Technology & Innovation

The rapid pace of technological change can both provide governments and individuals with new tools to achieve policy goals, while also presenting societies with new economic, political, and social challenges. The harnessing of new technologies can unlock new economic growth, enhance inclusivity and equity, and increase citizens’ quality of life, but their potentially damaging side effects must also be managed. In an era of growing geopolitical and economic competition, governments must also focus on how to ensure their societies retain a technological edge, and produce new innovative products and solutions to drive growth.

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Since COVID-19 began to spread within the United States in January of this year, the United States has been concentrating its efforts on mitigating the crisis at both a state and federal level. However, all efforts at containing the growing cybersecurity problems have been surface level and reactive at best.

Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center submitted a questionnaire to more than 100 technology experts to record their expectations about the impact of COVID-19 on innovation in five key fields: the future of work, data and AI, trust and supply chains, space commercialization, and health and medicine.

Our approaches for pathogen detection & antigen development are too slow. Using high-speed computers, biosensors, and the Internet, we can universalize and automate the process for pathogen detection and antigen development, such that we can automatically sense an abnormal pathogen and immediately start synthesizing in a computer’s memory techniques to mitigate it. Once an abnormal pathogen is detected, we can automate the antigen development (e.g., phages, e. coli that eat other e. coli, and more) to have a solution ready much faster for possible use than conventional means. We can build an auto-immune system for the planet.

Learn what the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center has done since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. View our video recaps. Read our analyses. Glean insights on how tech, data, and leadership can ensure the world gets through the pandemic and we build a better post-COVID-19 world together.

Content

A Tunisia-based company operated a sophisticated digital campaign involving multiple social media platforms and websites in an attempt to influence the country’s 2019 presidential election, as well as other recent elections in Africa. In an exclusive investigation that began in September 2019, the DFRLab uncovered dozens of online assets with connections to Tunisian digital communications firm UReputation. On June 5, 2020, after conducting its own investigation, Facebook announced it had taken down more than 900 assets affiliated with the UReputation operation, including 182 user accounts, 446 pages, and 96 groups, as well as 209 Instagram accounts. The operation also involved the publication of multiple Francophone websites, some going back more than five years.

Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has distanced himself from the national identity politics of his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. This has significantly complicated Russian efforts to demonize "nationalistic" Ukraine.

Amidst pandemics and protests, American ingenuity and daring continue to prove every bit the equal of prior generations. Read Atlantic Council Board Director Ahmed Charai's latest in the National Interest.

As the need for alternatives to Huawei 5G technology becomes more urgent, democracies must pursue these kinds of diplomatic, coalition solutions. Forming a democratic 5G alliance is a step in that direction.

This post is a call for those who have positive solutions to address these issues to reach out to the Center; we are here to amplify your voice. Please reach out to us. This post is also to re-commit the Center to six concrete actions during this time of turbulence that were already implicit to our mission and we wanted to make publicly explicit.

For the fourth installment of the GeoTech Center’s expert survey series, we asked a range of business leaders and tech experts how COVID-19 has impacted their industry’s or enterprise’s supply chains. Significant shortages of personal protective equipment and tests have plagued hospitals, and many countries’ dependence on China quickly became evident in the initial rush to obtain supplies. Food supply chains have also been significantly disrupted--for instance, infection rates at meat packing plants are five-times greater than those in similar geographies.

On May 28, 2020 - Daniella Taveau, Dr. Molly Jahn, and Dr. David Bray, PhD, Atlantic Council GeoTech Center Director shared a discussion on how tech, data and geopolitics impact food. The discussion focused on how these vulnerabilities have existed for sometime and how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these issues, amplifying existing instabilities, inequities, and insecurities, and will continue to do so unless action is taken to address problems in the food system.

Events

#ACFRONTPAGE EVENT – As COVID-19 accelerates existing global trends and tensions, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg discusses how the Alliance is embracing this new normal and preparing for the next decade and beyond.

9:00amONLINE EVENT

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